EMOTE TO CONNOTE

01-January-2017

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR

Our emotions add jazz to our life, relationships, interactions, and also communicating with others. Life would have been dull without our emotions. Emotions reflect our life, including the way we look at life. Psychological studies have shown that our facial movements and subsequent emotions play a major role in the impressions other people carry about us. Don’t you know that most success stories of achievers are the outcome of a range of emotionally uplifting facial expressions?

You need not be an actor to emote with your feelings, or emotions... It’s said that we seldom use more than 25 per cent of our emotions through words, or verbal communication. This, in effect, means that we allocate 75 per cent of our communicative skills on body language, or posture and, of course, facial expressions. Just think of it — non-verbal communication seems to help us do a lot more things in everyday life than written language.

All of us would be far better placed in living harmoniously with others, if only we communicated better with our emotions. The problem is most of us have never endeavoured to develop, or cultivate, the ability to read the feelings, or thoughts, of others. We have, at best, ‘stonewalled’ our own feelings and also feelings of others. The irony is we tend to listen to facts — not emotive details of a situation. We also often disregard emotions at the drop of a thought.

Our sight, smell, touch, hearing, and taste are, like emotions, fundamental senses. Yet, we aren’t as attuned to emotions as we are to the other five senses. We love to discuss the flavour of food, for instance, endlessly. Not our emotions. Result? We often ‘jam’ our natural emotions. In so doing, we also deny our sense of empathy to our own feelings.

Remember, when you give room to express our feelings, you always reach a higher level. You allow our greatest moments of relief to ensue. How? By simply understanding, accepting and recording what you are feeling, when someone is feeling low, or depressed. You never took sides, all right — but, you played a part in easing someone’s distress, effortlessly. You were truly considerate to the situation.

You should see emotions as a ‘stockpile,’ not as something that ignites a sense of fear, or gloom. However this may be, you need to keep a watch on your emotional intensity, if you are the extreme emotional type. Because, this can, paradoxically, be terrifying for some people who don’t emote easily. The world is so full of them — you know this, don’t you?

All of us are endowed with feelings, or a sense about someone, or situations. You’ve often guessed situations right — even before events have happened. You have congratulated yourself when you’ve deduced the outcome of a circumstance, almost perfectly. This occurs only because you’ve carried your feelings and used them as a measure to assess the impact of other people’s behaviour as well as your own. When you get a firm ‘hand-hold’ of this simple, nature-given quality, you’ll be able to identify needs that are not being met in your life.

Emotions are nothing but energy. They are also the molecules of thoughts, feelings, and life. Energy mirrors the physics of consciousness — power and motion. Your emotion is kinetic energy; it is not static energy. It’s something that helps you move and reach. There can be no traffic jams on your emotional expressway, even when you don’t express your emotions. Yet, you’d transform your life, quickly. Because, all it takes to understand others’ emotions is as simple as understanding your own troubles and also happiness.